TITLE: An Accidental Tune (1/1) AUTHOR: Nynaeve E-MAIL: scully@on-net.net RATING: G CATEGORY: post-ep KEYWORDS: MSR, angst SPOILERS: "Requiem" SUMMARY: It's post-"Requiem"; there's exactly one paragraph of baby-fic. So now you either don't have any interest in it or you're thrilled because it's post-"Requiem" and has almost nothing to do with the baby. You decide if that means you're going to read it. DISCLAIMER: Chris Carter... yadda, yadda, yadda ... 1013 ... blah, blah, blah. Bottom line: not mine. FEEDBACK: Yup. Love it. Keep it all in little folders, specifically marked for each story. Respond to all of it too. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Anywhere, just let me know please where it's going so I can visit. Spookys - feel free to archive. DEDICATION: To the usual, A and J. AUTHOR'S NOTES: I don't do baby-fic. It's personal, but I don't read it as a general rule and I don't write it. So let's not ask where this came from. I know exactly where that is, actually, and if anyone can correctly identify the book from which the title line came, I will send cyber-chocolates your way! There's another post-Requiem fic on the way too, if I ever get more than three paragraphs written. And for those of you reading "Vesparys", don't worry, I'm still working on it. Part 10 will be posted soon. An Accidental Tune When we were stationed in San Diego our next door neighbors had a piano. Commander Doug Leland shipped out fairly often and on long cruises; six to nine months at a time was not uncommon for him. They had no children, their only son having died of meningitis at the age of four, about ten years before we shared a fence with the Lelands, before the closeness of Naval Housing carelessly knitted us up together. Rebecca Leland was a wonderful pianist, often playing for hours with no more than a few, short breaks between pieces. Given her talent and obvious love of music, it was a shame, in my mind, that occurrence and personality had combined in such a way that her only outlet for that passion was the solitary affair her fingers carried out daily with the ivory of the keyboard. For all her gifts, it would have yet been unseemly for an officer's wife to give piano lessons. (The Navy has changed over the years and many wives even work now, but back then, in the early Seventies while the world without shuddered and changed and emerged from its tumults with an eye to the new and different, the United States Navy remained a bastion of tradition and the old ways). No, it simply was not done. And for all that it simply was not done, it didn't matter because Rebecca Leland's personality, strict, cold, impatiently virtuoso, could never have tolerated the parade of children who might otherwise have passed through her door, sat on the highly polished wood bench, and, with varying degrees of skill and desire, maneuvered their fingers over the keys, following the intricate sound maps laying open on the music stand before them. Rebecca Leland's remained a talent hidden behind a pressboard door of institutional beige. Yet when the weather was pleasant (which is much of the time in San Diego), all along the street on which we lived windows would open to welcome in the cool, inviting, sweet air, the melodies that woman called forth would drift along the currents of breeze and bring smiles to the hearers. Since we lived right next door, my children were most often the foremost attendees at these unrecognized concerts. Sitting around the kitchen table, eating cookies and drinking milk, books spread around them as they did homework, they would listen. Some days they would even *hear*. The year Dana turned nine was a particularly warm one, with few winter storms to mar the days. As what was left of winter blended into spring, the children grew more and more aware of Mrs. Leland's music. Melissa would close her eyes, humming quietly to pieces she had learned during these afternoons. Sometimes she would doodle in the margins of her math papers as she listened. Much of her work in English that year had a decidedly romantic cast to it, as the notes and melodies and rhythms found their way into her subconscious. Charlie would frown and lose concentration when Mrs. Leland took one of her rare breaks. I don't think he was ever aware of this, just as Missy was oblivious to her receptiveness. It was Bill and Dana, my middle children, my two who are far more alike than they will ever admit and far less different than either of them would like, who understood, who valued most highly those long afternoons spent listening to music foreign to most of their peers. Often times, watching them as adults, I think back to those particular afternoons and I see in my children then the adults they have become. I see again my lost Melissa and though we are separated by many years, I understand at last Rebecca Leland's loss and her isolation from the world around her. I see in Missy's young face all the love and passion she would spend on ideas considered outlandish and preposterous by her family; I see too the contentment in her eyes, curving her lips into a fair smile as the music plucked strings within her that sounded, deep and sweet, in harmonies we never quite comprehended. I see in Charlie, my ever-absent son, that focus, the drive that keeps him far from us and I know what happens when the source which keeps him focused wanes, when he finishes a project or assignment. Like the little boy he once was, the man wanders until something new comes along. And of course I see the two children who have stayed closest to me. I see them in their intensity, their rivalry and their protectiveness of one another. Though they often needle one another and rub each other the wrong way, they love one another in the same prickly way they did as children. I sometimes worry they have forgotten that and I wish I knew how to remind them. While Missy and Charlie enjoyed the music, absorbed it, Bill and Dana were inspired by it. Both could hear, instinctually, its regular, logical patterns. They could find the beauty in its structure and they sought to give names to all they heard. During that winter and spring, tumbling into summer even, they listened and they learned. Together they voyaged along a path of initiation. Neither would ever play a musical instrument, but both learned all the terms, all the ways of playing, soft or strong, languorously or vigorously. They breathed the terms of the musical world as though they intoned from sacred texts. Names of composers dripped from their lips in both knowledgeable context and joyous passion. To them the music was beautiful because it was ordered, it made sense and its order, its sensibility never changed. Music was an absolute. Day after day, Mrs. Leland's fingers would describe waltzes or fugues or nocturnes. From the keyboard in front of her would rise accord, euphonious and graceful as notes, chords, even scales floated from the well tuned strings of the instrument she so loved. While the Lelands had no surviving children, they did have a cat. That cat adored Mrs. Leland and rarely left her side. Callers often described how the cat would sit on the piano bench, if the day's playing was interrupted, and wait patiently, its green eyes dismissive of the intruder, until such time as its mistress could return and begin anew her daily concert. From time to time, during those rare breaks, we would hear discord rising from the keys, cacaphonic sound jangling over our ears. After several months it was Charlie who solved the riddle, saying one day, "It's the cat. Walking on the keys." Bill and Dana, who had no term for such an event, came in time to call it an 'accidental tune'. We would laugh and assign these so-called 'tunes' numbers: Accidental Tune, opus number fifty-three... I think we came to enjoy those little moments just as much as the grand sounds of Mrs. Leland's skilled hands gracing the piano. Maybe it is odd, but in those accidental moments, we drew together, were in some way closer, perhaps with the momentum of the shared joke steering us. That summer Rebecca Leland became ill. Commander Leland was rushed home as fall approached and by Halloween, she had died. We wives would eventually learn she had died of breast cancer, unnoticed and untreated until it was too late. The day of the funeral was cold, rainy. Windows remained firmly shut and the sounds of the world at large were not admitted. Dana and Bill insisted on going to the service. We let them, their father and I, because although they had never truly known Rebecca Leland, she had changed their lives in some way and they, wishing to pay their respects to her, were allowed to do so. The Navy chaplain said nice things about Mrs. Leland. They may indeed have been true, but the fact was none of us had ever known her well enough to be certain. Few tears were shed during this eulogy. Commander Leland stood, ramrod straight, face grim, his arm around a woman who turned out to be his sister-in-law. There was no singing and no extraneous Biblical verses were read. Instead a pianist, a well known pianist from Los Angeles, spoke a few words about the woman he had known and then sat down to play some of her favorite pieces. My children wept then; Bill stoically allowing only a few tears to trickle down his cheeks; Dana shuddering quietly and clinging to me. I don't think music was quite the same for either of them ever again. Though they retained a life-long love of it, I think some of the passion, the joy went out of it that day. I know Dana cannot hear that final piece that was played that day without shedding a few carefully controlled tears. The cat went to live with the sister-in-law. Eighteen months later Commander Leland married a woman twelve years his junior. He sold the piano. Bill Sr. and I considered buying it for the children, but decided against it in the end. Too many moves were still ahead of us. We no longer heard the sounds of Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin, and the many others floating over to us. There were no more accidental tunes to be heard. Bill Sr.'s next duty station was in Virginia Beach and we left before the second Mrs. Leland gave birth to a daughter. Because the Navy was, and in its way still is, an extended family, we heard about the arrival of this first of five little Lelands, named Elise Rebecca. Years later, when Dana was in High School and only she and Charlie remained at home, we found ourselves stationed again with the Lelands and Dana used to baby-sit for them on occasion. The first few times I worried it might sadden her, but it never did. Rebecca Leland, like so many adults that hold only a temporary place in children's lives, had been relegated to the corner's of Dana's memory. The world moves on and children move with it more easily than we adults. If she lost, or put away, the memories of those days, one thing she did not lose was her passion for the elements of music that most excited her: order, logic, sense. I have watched my daughter live her life like those impromptu concerts to which we used to be privy. She waltzed through college and medical school, smiling and happy, confident and cheerful, almost every note in her life played to perfection. During her years working with Fox Mulder I have watched as the unseen notes of the fugue guided her, molded her. As she lay dying, I saw the landscape of a gentle nocturne slipping over her, gathering her in. Like the resounding chorus of a Broadway musical, I witnessed her astounding recovery and renewed joy in life. Throughout it all I have watched her try, time and again, to impose that order that she so loves, on her life. It has worked at times and at others she has been left adrift on a tide of discarded symphonies, finding only the counterpoint in the soundtrack of her life. I have stood back and watched as she struck a note, soft but true, beautiful in its isolation, breathtaking as it found its harmony with the note struck by Agent Mulder. Now she sits before me, staring out a window, lost. To her ears I fear the music is silent. He is gone, taken by aliens, claims her boss, Walter Skinner, and she believes it. I no longer question her. She has seen enough to convince herself and so I let it convince me. In front of her she sees nothing that makes any sense. It is as if the careful score she had struggled to compose has been washed in India ink. For all the unexpected moments of her life these last years, she has worked in, has found a way to make them fit and just as she was content with the melody of her life, it seemed to end. She pays no attention to me as I fiddle with her CD player, extracting a disc from its case and placing it in the changer. I turn the volume up so that the notes fill the room. The tears start, silently glide down her cheeks to splash on her thighs. She doesn't wipe them away. I stand next to her and hold her gently as this one piece, this piece that hearkens to her everything she holds precious, plays. Beethoven's immortal composition fills the room with a bitter harmony, haunting, appealing, calling out to something in us that is deep and primeval, for which we have no words, only the notes he laced together. She clings to me as she did all those years ago in a Navy chapel, sobbing for a woman she barely knew, mourning a gift that had gone from her life too soon. As the notes die away, as "Fur Elise" draws to its end, she says, "Mom, I don't know how to do this." "No one does, Dana," I tell her. "This..." she starts to say, her voice breaks. "I don't even know what to think, what to feel." She is sobbing again. I hold her, letting silence surround us. I despise the cost that has brought my child back to me, but I thrill to having her back, all the same. "I had made a life," she tells me at last. "I was comfortable, pretty happy with ... things. This ... I don't know how to make it fit in." "It's an accidental tune," I say softly. She looks up at me, her face wet with tears, her eyes red and swelling. "Do you remember, Dana?" Slowly, she nods. "Sometimes the best parts are the ones we didn't plan on, like those times that cat would walk on the keys and we would all laugh." She smiles at me. I have no illusions. There will be more moments like this, moments when she doubts, when I see her face full of fear and anger and pain and a thousand other emotions we haven't adequately named, but I trust in time these moments will become fewer and those in which she welcomes her own accidental tune will become more frequent. I have carried and borne four children and I know that soon the blood that is hers, that will sustain her child, the heart that beats in her chest which will beat for her child, the space within her, both physically and emotionally, that she will give up to this growing life will overtake her and she will welcome it. She will welcome it as my daughter welcomes every new thing in her life, with caution, but also with a deep, fierce passion and loyalty. And when this child's father comes home (and the look in Dana's eye tells me she will find him, as he has so often found her), she will share with him all of these moments, the waltzes, the fugues, the nocturnes, and even the accidental tunes. END